As part of my work with Wayne and Layne, Adam and I do a lot of work together remotely, since I live in Pennsylvania and he lives in Minnesota. It’s really nice to be able to quickly share a work in progress, whether it be a diagram in Inkscape or a printed circuit board layout in Kicad. Setting up a Skype or other screen sharing system incurs too much transaction cost and isn’t very quick, so I was looking for something quicker and simpler.
I wrote this little script to take a screenshot of my entire display, add a timestamp to the bottom, and automatically upload it to my website. I set up an SSH key between my computer and my webserver (that is unlocked when I login), and added the following script to my path as screenshot_poster.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# This script will capture the whole screen
# and upload it to the web in a known location
# Written by Matthew Beckler for Wayne and Layne, LLC
# Last updated August 31, 2012
cd /tmp
import -window root temp.png
WIDTH=`identify -format %w temp.png`
DATE=`date`
convert -background '#0008' -fill white -gravity west -size ${WIDTH}x30 caption:"$DATE" temp.png +swap -gravity south -composite screenshot.png
scp screenshot.png user@example.com:/var/www/rest/of/the/path/to/screenshot.png
DEST="http://example.com/path/to/screenshot.png"
# do you want a notification or to just open the browser?
#notify-send -t 1000 "Screenshot posted" "$DEST"
xdg-open "$DEST"
The final two lines allow you to make a little desktop notification of the URL, open a web browser to the image’s location, or both. Someday I will set up a nice keyboard shortcut to run this script, to make the process of sharing my work-in-progress as quick and easy as possible.
